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Favorite Trivia – LAW & ORDER
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| Do you know why there are 12 jurists? Because court astrologists picked the jury in ancient times. One for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac; 12 personalities for fairness. |
| alimony: Different from take-home pay; it’s leave-home pay – Arthur Murray’s press agent
Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs – Leonard Louis Levinson |
| “Who supports the NRA? Researchers have discovered that many of the alleged 5 million are enjoying their membership from the great beyond, as the NRA does not purge its rolls when members die. Nor is it possible to ever really quit the NRA . . . And who, exactly funds it? A 2013 report by the Violence Policy Center ‘found that three-quarters of its corporate contributions come from gun manufacturers and related businesses’. . . Now that it’s backed into a corner with a spineless Republican Congress in its pocket, expect more NRA-driven attacks on the news media, socialists and anyone else who dares to assert the most obvious thing in the world: the only way to stop mass shootings is to limit access to guns.”
Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2018 |
| “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never!”
Mikail Bulgakov (trans. Burgin & O’Connor) – Master & Margarita |
| “Few good writers come out of prison. Incarceration, I think, can destroy a man’s ability to write. The noise in prison is tremendous. Plus the paranoia—you do have to fear or distrust too many of the people you are among. The tension of past events is always there: You hassled someone three weeks ago when you were feeling strong; today, you are weak and the other guy is in the yard working out with weights. You get his bad looks. Then there is the daily injustice, which is inevitable—some guards have a hard-on just for you.”
Norman Mailer – The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |
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“In A.D. 9 Augustus passed a law, the Lex Papia Poppaea, which gave special privileges to those with three or more children, and restricted the rights of bachelors, spinsters or childless couples to inherit property.”
Notes to Satire VI (Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, trans. with notes by Peter Green) |
| “That judges of important causes should hold office for life is not a good thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.”
(Politics – Aristotle) |
| “Laws like the spider’s web, catch the fly and let the hawk go free.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| “Two drivers are talking. One of the drivers notices that the other has one side of his car painted green and the other side painted red.
‘Well, you see that’s for when I get into an accident,’ explains the other driver. ‘The police always believe my version of events because the witnesses always contradict each other.'” |
| In September of 2017, Saudi Arabian government “decreed it would allow women to drive, reversing a policy in place since 1957. . . But the reversal, which took effect June 24, flies against years of cultural and religious justifications trotted out by the country’s religious clerics. Allowing woman to drive, they declared, would invite promiscuity One cleric insisted driving could damage women’s ovaries, while another justified the ban on the grounds that women possessed only half a brain—and half of that was used for shopping, he claimed. . . A YouGov survey conducted before the ban was lifted found that nearly a quarter of Saudis opposed its reversal. A video posted on Twitter featured a man swearing he would burn a woman and her car if it broke down. Others tweeted under the hashtag ‘You will not drive’ and suggested creating a women-only lane so they could crash into one another.”
Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2018 |
| “The #MeToo movement has given me more grief than anything in a long time. . . It has made me think about the complexity of our life and the complexity of how we achieve justice without inflicting injustice.”
Vivian Gornick (In an interview with Emily Gould, Book Forum, Mar/Apr/May, 2021) |
